Nicki Minaj is on the cover of V, looking like a sort of Keith Haring painting come to life. She's so wild, that Nicki Minaj! And lest you think there's some crafty behind-the-scenes Svengali calling the stylistic shots, Minaj says:

"Everything I do has been approved by me personally. My team is mostly made up of guys, but none of them would ever think about telling me what to wear or what to do with my hair." [Racked]

Minaj's skull makeup seems reminiscent of Rico "Zombie Boy" Genest, whose full-body skeleton tattoos include darkened eye sockets and what the Times calls "ghoulishly large dentiture on his lips." Genest is a fashion reference now — "Rico is my muse," says Lady Gaga's stylist Nicola Formichetti — and Cathy Horyn mentions him in this story about what counts as pushing boundaries in fashion these days. Says the photographer Daniel Sannwald, "Everybody is concerned about pleasing the advertisers, and it's not just the big magazines." Retoucher extraordinaire Pascal Dangin: "We live in a rather dull moment in fashion." [NYTimes]

Speaking of fashion zombies, headless house Christian Lacroix, which is now just a licensing operation, is making homewares. [WWD]

You mean the Spice Girls aren't actually best friends in real life? Scary — who has a new reality show — allegedly "bombarded" Posh — who's a designer now — with requests to borrow some dresses to wear while filming, but Posh didn't lend her any. Apparently, Scary has a rep for borrowing designer clothes and not returning them — but Posh says she simply didn't have (and couldn't get) samples in Scary's size. We hope these ladies can stop right now, work out their differences, and make it last forever. Friendship never ends. [Mirror]

"I've developed a healthy sidelong glance at the fashion industry," claims new Lucky editor Brandon Holley. "I love fashion and I love clothes and I love the way people dress, but I don't cry at a Marc Jacobs show." [NYTimes]

Burberry is going to start showcasing different campaign ads on its website every month, roughly timed to match new deliveries of each collection to its stores. [WWD]

Tom Ford says he took a radical step when designing his women's wear show: He fitted the samples to his models, rather than selecting models based on who could fit his samples. "I wanted to represent all women. I literally designed the clothes for each woman. I took their measurements, thought about them, thought about what they wore. I know Lauren Hutton likes white, I know she likes a hat, I know she looks good in a fedora. I chose carefully. Lisa Eisner has always been one of my great friends and muses, and Rachel Feinstein is one of the most fabulous women in the world and I love her body and I love her. Daphne [Guinness] is amazing and I cannot say enough wonderful things about Beyoncé. I wanted each woman's personality and individual style to come through and am happy that I achieved that." [Vogue UK]

John Galliano explains that Christian Dior's pre-fall collection, which included plenty of tartan, argyle, and fur, was inspired by the Duchess of Windsor. [WWD]

Target is going to open 150-200 stores in Canada during 2013 and 2014, under the terms of a new deal signed with a subsidiary of the Hudson Bay company. Target says this is its first foray into retail beyond the United States. [WWD]

In 1973, French designers were pitted against Americans at a friendly, but competitive, international fashion show held at Versailles. The general consensus is that the American "team" — including Oscar de la Renta, Halston, and Anne Klein — wiped the floor with the French, and that one reason their collections stood out so much was that they were presented on a diverse cast of models, including stars like Bethann Hardison (who continues to trumpet diversity on the catwalk) and Pat Cleveland. Writes the Times, "the Grand Divertissement à Versailles was very nearly the first time that anyone in Paris had seen an African-American woman on a catwalk." This month, the Costume Institute is holding a luncheon to reunite those same black models — as many of them as can still be located. [NYTimes]